That said, it is important to take two or three practice tests when you begin studying for the SAT or ACT, even if you have an excellent first-time score, because you want to make sure you find any problem areas right away. You can use an SAT practice test as a formative assessment — a diagnostic test used to identify problem areas and hone your studying strategy to address them.
If you start off with a low score, you will want to take more practice tests on a regular basis — how often you do so should be based on when your test day is and how long you have to prepare. If your test day is far into the future, you will be able to space out your practice tests and study in between each round.
If your test is rapidly approaching, it may be a better idea to take plenty of practice tests more closely together and focus on studying the material that is giving you trouble, while reviewing other material in less depth. If you do buy books, be sure they have the most up-to-date information available, since both the SAT and the ACT were revised in Make sure any practice tests you use online are based on the most recent versions of the tests as well. The College Board offers 10 free SAT practice tests, six of which were previously administered to actual students.
You can also visit the ACT website for free practice questions; since these are the organizations that create and administer the respective exams, they are great sources for practice materials. We at CollegeVine also offer 3 free full-length and printable practice tests from our SAT curriculum:.
Test 1: Questions Solutions Manual. Test 2: Questions Solutions Manual. Test 3: Questions Solutions Manual. Simply create an account and log in to access full-length tests for free. Some students would rather practice for the SAT with paper and a pencil. After all, this is the manner in which the real test is administered.
Fortunately, the College Board website allows students to download and print out paper practice tests. Once students mark their answers, they can check their scores online or download an app to do it for them. The free Daily Practice for the SAT app enables students to get instant results and feedback simply by taking a photo of their answer sheet. Looking for a pencil-and-paper version of the ACT? You can find one courtesy of Hubspot. Additionally, test-takers get an action plan for improving their scores moving forward.
Download this guide to calculate your total score, subscores, and cross-test scores for SAT Practice Test 7. Download this guide to calculate your total score, subscores, and cross-test scores for SAT Practice Test 8.
PDF Document 1. Download this guide to calculate your total score, subscores, and cross-test scores for SAT Practice Test 9. PDF Document 1, PDF Document 3. Download this guide to calculate your total score, subscores, and cross-test scores for SAT Practice Test SAT Suite of Assessments. SAT Practice Tests. You'll need a printer, pencil, calculator, and timer to take the tests. Here are some tips: Mark your answers in the correct row of circles on the answer sheet.
Be especially careful if you skip questions. It's okay to guess. You won't lose any points if you're wrong. Learn how to enter your answers on math grid-ins.
The usual advice to those training for a marathon is to run more, run longer, and run to your limit. This works for marathons because running requires primarily one adaptation of your body. As you run more—no matter how you run, when you run, or where you run—your circulation should start to improve and your muscles should slowly strengthen. This, in turn, makes you a better runner. Students who believe in the Marathon Fallacy for SAT practice believe in the myth that all they need to do is pick up a practice test and churn away.
After churning through a bunch of practice SATs, students who believe in this myth take the SAT again and are shocked that their scores are the same or barely 10 points higher. Who would have guessed, but the brain is not a single muscle that responds to blind practice. Instead of comparing SAT practice to a marathon, it's better to think of the test as being similar to baseball.
When you practice baseball, technique matters. In short, you have to practice baseball to get good at it, but you need to practice carefully.
Ready to go beyond just reading about the SAT? Designed and written by PrepScholar SAT experts , our SAT program customizes to your skill level in over 40 subskills so that you can focus your studying on what will get you the biggest score gains.
Now, let me show you how to best prep for the SAT so that you, too, can get a perfect score! I see students get this method wrong the most. Students will pick up a generic set of practice SATs, not check the version or quality of them, and just use them from start to finish.
The problem with almost all SAT practice tests that are not official I call them cheap knockoff SATs is that only a minimum amount of work has been put into them to make them look like the SAT.
With cheap knockoff SATs, publishers tend to throw all kinds of trash into multiple-choice format and then call it "SAT practice.
Have you ever taken a cheap knockoff SAT practice test, looked at an answer, and said, "That can't be right"? Well, now you know why! The worst SAT questions are those free problems that float around on websites that clearly have no specialization on the SAT.
Usually, these sites have a ton of ads and prey on beginners. Publishers of cheap knockoff SATs are often under tight deadlines and take advantage of students. They know most students are novices and might be gullible enough to believe that anything in a multiple-choice format is similar to an actual SAT question. This wouldn't be horrible if all there was to the SAT was its multiple-choice format. But the test is much more complicated than this and asks certain questions in certain ways.
These ways are very specific and take a lot of work by high-scoring experts to figure out. If you're training with bad SAT practice questions, it's like training with a softball for a baseball game. You'll spend all your time optimizing your skills for the wrong thing. I believe in this concept so much that in my program, PrepScholar, we use only SAT practice tests released by the College Board for our full-length tests.
Even when we design drill-problems, we have three sets of experts carefully review each question to ensure they adhere to every detail and the overall format of the SAT. Many students are tempted to take shortcuts when doing SAT practice tests. Got five minutes before Mom picks you up from sports?
Then why not do two SAT math questions on your iPhone? The problem here is that you're training in an environment that differs significantly from that of the real SAT. Let's take the five-minute-on-your-iPhone example above to demonstrate exactly why a realistic setting matters:.
Studying hard or hardly studying? Practicing the SAT in bed is a bad idea. Now, five minutes of practice on an iPhone might be an uncommon example, but it's very easy to slack off, even when you're taking a practice SAT at your desk. So what should you do? Get out a table in a quiet room. Have the tests printed in front of you with bubble sheets. Use a real timer to give yourself scheduled breaks, and never give yourself even a minute more.
Once you're all set, take the entire test as if you were at an SAT test center. I believe in using a realistic test setting so much that our SAT prep program encourages this to the fullest extent possible. We have timers exactly like those on the real test, and automatically watch out for any noncompliance that can jeopardize the studying process. This might seem obvious, but it's definitely worth repeating the process described in the first two tips.
You need to put in time to improve on the SAT. While I'm against chugging practice test after practice test, at the end of the day the chugger will still do better than the test taker who puts in nearly zero time. Improving on the SAT takes hard work.
Unwillingness to accept this is the quickest route to stagnation. In fact, in this guide, I am assuming that you will be putting in at least 10 hours of SAT study time in total. If you're studying fewer than 10 hours, nothing can help you significantly improve your SAT score. Not a book, not some cheap tricks, not me—not even a five-figure "college consultant. In this case, the best way to improve your score is to simply put in more study time.
Similarly, if you're studying around hours, putting in more time will help you substantially. In this range, putting in time is just as important as doing the right kind of SAT practice.
We at PrepScholar believe in this time factor so much that our program records the time you study each week, and then predicts your progress based on this time.
We also regularly tell you whether the time you spend is enough to get the improvement you want on the SAT. All in all, definitely carve out enough time for SAT practice! The most important part of taking a practice test is to have a clear grasp of what questions you're getting wrong and why you're getting them wrong.
Too many students fall into this trap and think that as long as you've taken a practice SAT, you've gotten all you can get out of it. This is completely wrong. The reality is that analyzing your performance on each practice test is the key to score improvement.
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